1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system that dynamically integrates a set of communication networks to increase the overall heterogeneous network system performance and capabilities. In particular, the present invention relates to a technique of providing a Dynamic Heterogeneous Network System, and providing a Network Node entity and a Mobile Host entity into the system to support the heterogeneous network as described in the independent claims.
2. Related Art
Even though there is a large number of interest groups worldwide that do recognize a common target—to minimize the number of various network techniques used in the markets—there is today and also in the foreseeable future will be a large number of wired and wireless systems standardized and used both locally and globally.
Some of these network techniques have their roots quite far in the past, and they may have overcome a substantial amount of extensive improvement and optimization activities during the years that they have been in use, whereas some of the techniques are still in their early stages in their lifetime and can be based on using very sophisticated new methods to fulfill the requirements put towards them.
Some of these above mentioned new methods may have been impossible to realize in commercial products until the recent advances in for example circuit technologies and processing platform capabilities have come available.
Also the differences in the requirements put on the various network techniques have a deep influence on the level of ambition how the systems have consequently been implemented—some have been developed to be operational practically everywhere in the world with even beyond 99,999% of time availability requirements and data throughput rates being of tens of kilobits per second, and some are targeted for small personal area coverage with very low cost and low power consumption requirements and data throughput rates of even hundreds of megabits per second, the rest of the systems being positioned in between these two extremes. Also some systems are optimized for circuit switched services like voice, and some are optimized for packet switched services like internet browsing, computer networking and electrical mail.